Three Things: Muddy Waters - Mannish Boy
A Thumping New Testament Gospel from the Old God of Electric Blues
As part of therapy, I've been tasked to write more, specifically about music. The task is to write three things I love about a piece of music I deeply enjoy.
That voice… that sacred carved-out-of-Swamp-Chesnut-Oak voice, “Oooooooooohhh yeah… oh yeah,” is the first thing we hear. It is punctuated by those bent-string notes that originated from some ancient civilization, built from a source inside the Earth itself. “Everything, everything, everything gon’ be alright this morning,” Muddy assures us, and I believe him. Ohhhh, do I believe him. So do the people in the studio with him. They’re shouting. They’re cheering. They are primed. “Oh yeah… WHOOOOAAAAA!” You have my full attention, Muddy. Please do carry on with your bad self.
“I’m a MAAANNN. I’m a full-grown man. I’m a MAAANNN.” Muddy was born in Mississippi in 1913, and here he is making it absolutely fucking clear how he should be treated. He shouted it on record in 1955, again in ‘68, then here, on this definitive version in ‘77. As we know, some ignorant wretches didn’t get the message then or now.
Know every cliché and stereotype has an origin, and this is a peak redux of the seminal riff. It is the bedrock, it is the substratum, it is the foundation. The people in the studio that day with Muddy (Johnny Winter, Pine Top Perkins, and James Cotton among others) knew it, and this live cut inside those four walls is the sonic documentation we need to know just how joyful, how proud, and how all-encompassingly explosive Muddy’s music could be.